Biography | Pat Gelsinger — The Scholarship Exam That Took Him to Tilghman Street

People treat an Intel chief executive as a product of a famous engineering school.

Gelsinger's first credential was an associate degree from a trade campus on Allentown's west side.

At sixteen, still enrolled at Conrad Weiser, he sat a Lincoln Technical Institute electronics exam a year early and won a scholarship.

He left Robesonia, finished enough high-school credits to graduate, and worked as a technician at WFMZ-TV while he studied.

Lincoln Tech has trained students in the Lehigh Valley since 1949. The campus that now stands at 5151 Tilghman Street is the public pin for that training.

Some summaries send him to Lincoln Tech's West Orange, New Jersey, campus. The Computer History Museum oral history, a 2000 Morning Call profile, and Lincoln Tech's own later account all place the exam and the program in Allentown.

Intel's official career timeline says he took the associate degree and moved west in 1979, at eighteen.

A later Lincoln Tech page dates an Allentown graduation to 1981. The contemporaneous hire date in October 1979 is the stronger record, so this memory stays with 1979.

The degree was in electronics, not computer science. He later said he had not used a CPU before he arrived.

That is the point of the pin. The path into Intel did not start with a four-year laboratory. It started with a scholarship test and a technical institute on Tilghman Street.

From here a recruiter sent him on his first airplane ride, to Santa Clara, for a technician interview.

Photo: Cody Glenn / Web Summit, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.